As they take to the skies in a sumptuous new Victorian drama, Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne discuss their friendship with Giles Hattersley in the November issue of British Vogue.
Last year, Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne spent several months together in a wicker basket making a movie called The Aeronauts, about madcap Victorian balloonists. Based on real events from the 19th century, when gas balloons first soared to the heights of today’s commercial passenger jets in order to predict the weather, the film chronicles a circus-meets-science mission of daredevilry, for which Jones’s character spends most of her time wearing a corset at 37,000ft.
“When my agents sent me the script my first question was,” says Redmayne, his voice dropping into feigned diva-ishness, “‘Who’s playing Amelia?’” Jones interjects: “I mean, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a basket with someone you didn’t get on with for months.”
Although it would be easy to assume The Aeronauts was all green screen, Jones and Redmayne spent a few days up in an actual balloon, packed in next to a pilot with a small army of camera-laden helicopters and drones in hot pursuit across Oxfordshire – which nearly put an end to both of them. “We were in our costumes going up and Felicity was having to jump up and sit in the ring,” begins Redmayne. “The pilot says to Felicity and I, ‘Throw out the ballast!’” Jones chimes in: “So we threw out everything in the balloon. And then we’d thrown out too much.”
“We were careening towards a forest and didn’t have anything to stop us,” continues Redmayne. “We smashed into these trees…” Jones concludes: “We were grabbing on to each other, thinking, ‘This could be it.’ Then we crash landed in a field.”
The pair met circa 2008. “We knew each other socially, but not particularly well,” shares Redmayne. Then the Theory of Everything happened, “And that was… everything.” Since Redmayne scooped up the 2015 Academy Award for his performance as Professor Stephen Hawking, the home lives of the friends have had their share of joy, too. In 2016, Redmayne and his wife Hannah Bagshawe had a daughter, Iris, followed by a son, Luke, in 2018. Last year, too, Jones married the film director Charles Guard, and naturally Eddie was there for the celebrations at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire.
On the widespread reports that Tom Hanks, Jones’s co-star in 2016’s Inferno, was in attendance, the actress snorts: “No, he did not come! I bumped into him and said, ‘I’m so sorry everyone seems to think that you came to my wedding.’ He said, ‘Oh don’t worry about it, but somebody came up to me recently and asked, “Did you give her away?’”
Read the full interview in the November issue of British Vogue, which is out on newsstands on October 4 [Source]
